It's complicated

In the last week or two we have had some excitement in the course. I tried to introduce a couple more websites--deli.cioi.us and zotero--but they didn't go over too well with my students. They are fed up with having to manage all the sites and passwords. I don't blame them. I am so gungho about this web2.0 stuff and just imagined that they would be too but it's not that easy.

I went back to the Research Plan assignment and revised it to include the old standard methods of gathering sources and citing them. I've given them more choices and will encourage those who want to join me on those new websites that help people write and collaborate better. I've put up a group to that effect in Ning. I don't imagine I will have many takers but so be it. The rest of the semester will be about the writing and less about the technology.

I also went through the process of asking them if they wanted to make our Ning network a public network. The vote was 70% in favor but I decided not to change it. If 30% didn't want to change it to public that seems a goodly amount. After all, it would mean that some of them would have to go in and edit out certain things they have put up in the network. Sometimes you can't go back on decisions that were made because people get used to how things work and don't want to change. Next time I will make it public from the beginning. They should experience what it means to write for the open Web.

Facebook1

In Saturday's NYT there was an interesting OpEd piece by Alice Mathias entitled "The Facebook Generation." Mathias is a recent graduate from Dartmouth and might know a thing or two about how college students use Facebook. And she does! She says that since Facebook has been opened up to everyone earlier this year, that it has been trying to become a more traditional, functional networking tool between people with common interests instead of what it has always been for students: "online community theater." What does this mean for me and my class which is trying to use a the networking site Ning?

Ning could be said to be a ripoff of Facebook. It has all the components of Facebook--profile and comment page, forums and groups, the ability to upload media. I do operate it as a closed space, a
"walled garden" so to speak. I have not defined it as different from Facebook. I expect students to use the skills they've honed in Facebook and use them for academic purposes. But now I learn that the skills they have are skills that relate more to self display then to actual networking or collaboration, so it seems that I have to more rigidly define our Ning space and oppose it to Facebook then to say: Ok, now do what you've been doing on Facebook but make it some how a part of the course work that allows you to become a better writer. Or, I could try to interrogate how self display could become an asset to learning to write better?

Another idea has come to me from reading the discussions in the Ning network: College 2.0. Laura Gibbs talks about the biggest difference between Facebook and a network such as Ning is that Facebook is "locked down". You can open Ning up to the public. For instance, College 2.0 is open to everyone but you have to be a member to post. My classroom Ning network is private. I thought that would be a good idea for the privacy of my students but she says that it's better to open it up so students can write to a wider audience and experience what that is like. Opening up our Ning network might emphasize my desire that students learn to write for a particular audience and might give them a clear distinction between Facebook and our "academic network" for first-year writing.

6th week course survey

I surveyed my two seat classes yesterday (using fo.reca.st) to see how we were doing. The verdict was ok, not great but ok. Forty-five percent gave the class a 3/5 and 36% gave it a 4/5. No one gave it a 5 and only 10% and 8% gave it a 2/5 and a 1/5 respectively. Forty percent gave the qustion: "Does my professor care about my learning" a 5/5. The areas that need more attention are "explaining the course concepts"--54% gave it a 3/5. And, the question "how capable do you feeling to write the rhetorical analysis paper" (due in a week) only got 18% at 4/5--the highest rating. Most (69%) were in the 2 & 3/5 range. (see the full survey link-forthcoming)

Next class I intend to work more on the language of the analysis so that they can see what analysis writing looks like.

Mixed Bag

The Rhetorical Analysis Assignment

I was talking with a colleague today about teaching the rhetorical analysis. I wondered out loud about the sequence of course assignments I had set them up to do for the semester—Media Literacy Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis, Research Plan Paper, and Project. They are having trouble with the RA assignment I think because it didn’t seem to fit in the sequence. It’s a heuristic to get them to understand how writing works so that they can be better writers but it seems to be a futile exercise to a large degree mostly because it is not about them and their writing. It’s about someone else’s writing and whether it is effective our not. Perhaps, I mused, the sequence should be to write an essay in a format that you are interested in, then find someone else who had written the same sort of essay, do the rhetorical analysis of their essay, then fully research and rewrite the original essay using the rhetorical analysis as a revision tool.

Tool Time

I’ve just spent a week trying to implement a couple different Web2.0 programs in my class and failing. First I tried to use Diigo, the social book marking tool. It allows the user to highlight and put sickies on web pages and then share those web pages with others. The problem is that no one could see the stickies or highlights on the document that I put up on the web pages. There was an immediate confusion with how to share bookmarks. This had something to do with using the applet Diigo supplied or the toolbar which you had to download. The toolbar seemed to work better—that is, you could share bookmarks better with the toolbar. But my students weren’t getting it. My idea was to have them annotate an essay so that we could all see the suggestions and participate in putting them on the page and see the process of revision. It was not to be.

The second site I wanted to use was MyComLab/Exchange to do peer reviews. It however has a problem with downloading Shockwave on Vista 64bit machines so I had to scotch it in favor of Wikispaces. Last term I did peer reviews in Google Docs with only moderate success. I am more hopeful this time. It’s convenient that Wikispaces has the discussion areas on every page to enable my students’ comments.